1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a method, system and program product for automatically assigning electronic addresses to users. More specifically, the present invention allows valid electronic mailing addresses to be automatically assigned to computer users.
2. Related Art
As the use of electronic mail becomes more pervasive, the complexity involved in assigning electronic mailing addresses grows. Specifically, with the number of electronic mail users exploding, there is an increasing need to avoid non-unique and/or non-compliant electronic mailing addresses. That is, not only should the users have a unique electronic mailing address, but the electronic mailing addresses should conform to any applicable addressing standards (e.g., RFC 2822). These issues are especially important in an organization that has numerous members (e.g., an employer).
In general, a particular organization might have one or two preferred formats for their electronic mailing addresses. For example, “ABC, Inc.” might want all electronic mailing addresses of its employees to include a first initial and a complete last name. Thus, an individual named “Joe Smith” would have an electronic mailing address of JSMITH@ABC.COM. Such formatting requirements, however, could lead to two different individuals with the same name being assigned the same electronic mailing address. In an attempt to avoid this, and to provide compliance with any applicable addressing standards, previous systems have required an administrator or the like to manually validate and/or assign electronic mailing addresses. Such a requirement can be extremely burdensome and expensive in organizations having numerous members.
Other systems, such as that disclosed in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. US 2002/0032740 A1 (hereby incorporated by reference), attempt to “guess” existing electronic mailing addresses of users. For example, assume a sales organization has ten members of Company “XYZ” in its database. Further assume that the sale organization only has one of the ten members' electronic mailing addresses. The previous system could be utilized to reverse engineer the one address in an attempt to determine the addresses of the other nine individuals. Specifically, once a set of possible format patterns is deduced by reverse engineering the known address, the format patterns are used to generate a collection of “possible” electronic mailing addresses for the other members of the organization. Once the possible addresses are generated, test emails are sent thereto. Unfortunately, test emails of this nature can significantly consume the resources (e.g., the routers) of the receiving organization. Moreover, the test emails could be blocked by anti-spam software.
In view of the foregoing, there exists a need for a method, system and program product for automatically assigning electronic addressees (e.g., as electronic mailing addresses). Specifically a need exists for a system that allows a sequence of address generation scripts to be provided. A further need exists for a single electronic address to be generated according to a first script in the sequence, and then be tested for uniqueness and compliance. Still yet, a need exists for a new address to be generated according to a next script in the sequence if the first address is not both unique and compliant.